Source: GIPHY
Back in the day, ahead of a good friend’s birthday, your parents or grandparents would haul out the yellow pages and flick through the listings to find a suitable florist to purchase a birthday bouquet.
Fast forward to today, where most physical purchases (and definitely online ones) begin with a Google search:
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78% of location-based mobile searches lead to an offline purchase.
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After searching from a mobile device, 88% of customers will either call or visit the business within 24 hours.
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56% of local retailers have not claimed their listing on Google My Business.
Google My Business is the modern-day yellow pages. You can’t expect customers to find you if your business isn’t listed.
It goes way beyond the basic contact info that you’d find in the yellow pages, though.
Your business can:
- connect with customers in multiple ways,
- broadcast updates and offers,
- post pictures and videos,
- place ads, and
- provide other essential information about your business.
You can complete all of these activities through your Google My Business dashboard.
Customers can:
- leave reviews,
- ask questions and receive answers,
- make bookings,
- post photos of your business, and
- save your business (favorites, want to go, starred.)
By verifying your business on Google, you’re also gaining access to valuable insight and data and your business, from clicks and calls to bookings and follows, helping you learn more about customer behavior.
And best of all — it’s free!
Have we sold you on the benefits of setting up a Google My Business account? Now you want to know how to do it? Galactic Fed is here to guide you through building your business profile on Google. Every excellent SEO strategy should begin by setting up a Google My Business account.
Now, without further adieu (drum roll, please.)
Here’s our step-by-step guide to getting your business on Google:
Create a Google My Business Account
Step 1: Create a (free) business profile
Set up an account on the Google My Business homepage. Begin with adding your business name (or searching for it if your business has been claimed previously.)
Adding your business will allow you to manage how your business appears on Google Search and Google Maps:
Step 2: Pick a category that explains your business
You do have to choose from Google’s predefined categories but try to find the category that is as close to what you do as this tells Google what customers they should put your listing in front of.
Step 3: Give Google key info about the location of your business
If you have a brick and mortar business, including your exact address is crucial for customers to find you on Google Search and Google Maps.
If you’re a service-based business with a larger service area, say a whole state or both the US and Canada, you’ll want to tell Google this when prompted after adding your location:
Step 4: Add a description and photos to your business profile
Google gives you 750 words to describe your business, 250 of which appear in the knowledge panel displayed down the right-hand side of the search engine results page if searching on desktop, on a mobile device, your description appears by clicking on the ‘About’ tab on your business listing.
Not to be confused with the sentence-long description that appears directly under reviews. Google’s algorithm creates this and you must request to edit it, and only if it’s factually incorrect:
Follow Google’s business description guidelines so that you don’t break any rules when writing your description.
According to Google, a business listing with images gets 35% more click-throughs to their website than a listing without images.
Step 5: Verify your Google My Business listing
There are a number of ways to verify your Google My Business listing:
- By postcard
- By phone
- By email
- Instant verification
- Bulk verification
Google has a great minute-long YouTube video that outlines how to verify your business listing:
Optimizing your Google My Business Profile
Step 6: Enhance your business listing and amplify your brand
Add your logo, upload a cover photo, and create a post to tell potential customers what you do and what makes your business unique:
Step 7: Get your customers to nice things about you
If you are creating a brand-spanking-new Google My Business listing, you’ll want to build up customer reviews. Reach out to happy customers and ask them to leave you a review, Google has made it easy for you to do this with a form you can share directly from your Google My Business dashboard:
Step 8: Let customers take a look around & list unique attributes
Google’s made it possible to give customers a virtual tour of your business and you tell customers if you’re a women-led, black-owned or LGBTQ-friendly establishment.
Google is continuously making enhancements to its My Business platform. Just this year it announced they would be making it easier for local businesses to showcase in-store products online.
Galactic Fed Tip: Keep a close eye on your business listing
Review your Google My Business customer insight and data regularly to understand how people interact with your listing.
The Google My Business App is a great way to take a peek at customer behavior on the go. You can see views of your business listings, search views, and various activity like website visits and direction requests, all from the palm of your hand:
Create & maintain a powerful business listing on Google
There you have it! Eight simple steps to getting your business on Google so that customers can find you easily and your business can grow exponentially.
As with other SEO activities, you need to keep on top of your Google My Business listing as it can quickly become out-of-date and stop driving traffic to your site as well as it could and should be.
Keep your business and operation hours updated, provide COVID-19 related updates as a minimum. Make your Google My Business stand out from the rest by posting regularly, adding photos, and providing virtual tours, for example.
You can learn more about building an effective SEO strategy for your business by checking out Galactic Fed’s SEO blog series. Or, if you have any questions about getting your business on Google, give us a shout!
